Analyst Perspectives

Increased enterprise focus on artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) has served to sharpen the focus on the need for trusted data and reliable analytics and data operations. The ISG State of Generative AI Market Report highlighted that elevated expectations and demands associated with AI are a forcing function for enterprises to take long-overdue steps to improve data and analytics processes to ensure that data that is clean, well-organized and compliant with regulatory...

One of the promised benefits of artificial intelligence (AI), Generative AI (GenAI) and agents is that they can make everyone their own financial and business analyst. It’s true that these technologies can make it possible for everyone to access once hard-to-reach data (with suitable permissions), unleash agents to assemble the data into useful tables and charts along with commentary describing results and highlighting underlying drivers of results, propose next best actions and use natural...

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are comprehensive software platforms designed to integrate and manage all the core processes of an enterprise while recording transactions and their financial consequences to support the accounting and finance functions. ISG Software Research recently completed our Buyers Guide™ for ERP systems, designed to help enterprises that are replacing their existing ERP software to make the best choice, both in terms of the product’s performance as well as the...

Late 2024 saw the publication of the 2024 ISG Buyers Guides for DataOps, providing an assessment of 49 software providers offering products used by data engineers, data scientists, and data and AI professionals to facilitate the use of data for analytics and AI needs. The DataOps Buyers Guide research includes five reports which are focused on overall DataOps, Data Observability, Data Orchestration, Data Pipelines and Data Products. This is the first time in the industry when all software...

It is now more than two years since the launch of ChatGPT introduced the world to generative AI (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs). GenAI-based assistants and co-pilots are now widely adopted, with individuals and enterprises adopting GenAI models to automate the generation of text, digital images, audio, video and code, amongst other things.

Databricks recently announced its Series J funding round, successfully raising $10 billion at a valuation of $62 billion. Led by Thrive Capital alongside high-profile investors such as Andreessen Horowitz and Insight Partners, the company intends to invest this capital towards new artificial intelligence (AI) products, acquisitions and significant expansion of its international operations. In the announcement, Databricks reported that it expects to achieve an annual revenue run rate of $3...

Metadata management has played a role in data governance and analytics for many years. It wasn’t until the emergence of the data catalog as a product category just over a decade ago that enterprises had a platform for metadata-driven data management that could span multiple departments and use cases across an entire enterprise.

The degree to which data platforms are critical to efficient business operations cannot be overstated. Without data platforms, enterprises would be reliant on a combination of paper records, time-consuming manual processes and huge libraries of physical files to record, process and store business information. The extent to which that is unthinkable highlights the level at which today’s enterprises and society as a whole rely on data platforms. The core persistence, management, processing and...

Despite all the interest in artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI), ISG’s Buyers Guide for Data Platforms serves as a reminder of the ongoing importance of product experience functionality to address adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability. While new and emerging capabilities might catch the eye, features that address data platform security, performance and availability remain some of the most significant deal-breakers when enterprises are considering potential...

I recently completed the latest edition of our Business Planning Buyers Guide, which reviews and assesses the offerings of 14 providers of this software. One of the points that I look at is whether and to what extent the software provider offers out-of-the-box external data useful for forecasting, planning, analysis and evaluation. What I discovered is that the availability of this type of vital information is exceedingly slim.